The Unfinalizable Learner - Lichnost’, AI, and the Cyborg Ontology of Uniqueness

This critical commentary responds to Matusov’s (2026) “Against Equity: Toward a Uniqueness Model of Educational Justice” by pursuing three interconnected lines of argument. First, I support and extend Matusov’s provocation that the equity model functions ideologically, drawing an explicit parallel to Marx’s critique of religion as the opium of the people to expose how the remedy mystifies the structures that produce suffering, including the unexamined subject position of those who appoint themselves distributors of educational justice. Second, I argue that Matusov’s invocation of lichnost’ (личность) needs to be placed at the heart of education for a uniqueness approach, grounded in Bakhtin’s (1984) ontology of the once-occurrent event of being. Third, I argue that AI, as a new cultural phenomenon, renders the equity apparatus obsolete by dissolving the scarcity conditions on which it depends. Also, the emerging human-AI hybrid, understood through Haraway’s (1985) cyborg concept, extends lichnost’ into a new form: the cyborg uniqueness of a being whose becoming is co-authored by human and non-human intelligence.